I bet you can see the moon with that lens!

Why, yes, yes I can.  If I try really hard I can see it without the lens too.

Tonight the moon passed by at the closest distance it will be all year.  It also happened to be a full moon.  I thought I'd give photographing it a go.  I am never really happy any time I make a picture of the moon.  Its a purely equipment driven kind of picture, and well, I'm sorely lacking in moon picturing equipment ( getting longer a lens to take pictures of the kids playing ball may help ... hint, hint Carly [she doesn't read these anyway]).  But, this one turned out okay.

The rest of this post is purely about the technical side of this picture, so most of you probably want to go web surf elsewhere...

This was taken with my D200, with a 2x teleconverter mounted on my 80-200 lens.  My tripod is up to the task, but the tripod mount on the lens really isn't.  Stacking a 2x on a zoom lens hurts quite a bit too.  I chose an exposure of f/11 at 1/30th of a second.  Because the shutter was so slow, I used the mirror lock up function on the camera.  It makes a noticeable difference.  I have some frames where I didn't wait long enough from the initial mirror movement to make the picture.  They look like mush.

Anyway, fun exercise-- and I have a picture of the moon.